CHAPTER I
The Beginning
It is not every day, I suppose, that a man might find himself floating, stark naked and alone, down a Borneo river, in pitch darkness. I was, in a manner of speaking, lost. Only in a manner of speaking of course, because I knew exactly where I was in terms of time and space. It was around seven-thirty on the evening of 16th April 1961. I had been in the water about half an hour. My present position therefore was just under two miles downstream from the junction of the Labuk and the Tungud rivers, and about twenty miles from the Sulu Sea, in Her Majesty's Colony of British North Borneo. Since my companions obviously could not find me, it might be more strictly accurate, I thought, to say that I was misplaced rather than lost.
`Scottish Planter Misplaced in Jungle River'
The headlines in the North Borneo News would look ridiculous. There was an element of carelessness about it.
Less than an hour or so earlier, I had achieved the distinction of becoming the first human being in history to water-ski on the Labuk River. After more unsuccessful attempts than Robert the Bruce's spider, I had eventually managed to cling on to the tow-bar long enough for the outboard launch to pull me bodily up out of the water. I found myself for the first time in my life skittering along on the surface, balanced somewhat precariously on my skis. It was a great feeling. My sudden success created much excitement amongst the small group of locals who had come along for an evening drink to the riverside atap hut, which we somewhat pretentiously called the Labuk Club. They cheered and waved.
With my launch driver Tundah up front at the controls of the Pekaka, and with Kong Miew looking after the twin 60 h.p. Mercury outboard motors in the stern, I clung fiercely to the tow-bar with one hand, and pointed upstream. It would be nice, I thought, now that I had got the knack, to have one or two turns around the wide pool formed by the junction of the Labuk and the Tungud, before returning to the Club for a celebratory drink.
The sun was just sinking behind Mount Kinabalu. It would be dark in a few minutes. It was one of those spectacular blood-shot Sabah sunsets, which are only to be seen in the dry season, in the few brief minutes before it gets dark. I seemed to be carving my way through a sheet of rippling red satin and the spray from the outboards arched in a golden parabola. I was beginning to enjoy myself. There was really nothing to this water skiing lark! Instead of circling as I intended however, Tundah swung the Pekaka into the much narrower Tungud tributary and we surged on upstream. This was far too ambitious for my first run. The sun had nearly disappeared and the jagged ridges of Kinabalu were turning velvety black against a muted purple sky.
There is no twilight on the equator. It would be dark before we could get back. I shouted at them. I waved furiously. Kong Miew at the stern waved back happily. We sped on upstream. I began to realise that proper water-skiers must have some sort of signaling system for communicating with their crew.
We surged on and on, up the Tungud. The dark jungle now crowded in on both sides, blocking out any last glimpse of the sunset. The was from our wake broke on the mud flats at each bend; making the crab-eating rah monkeys leap back into the trees and chatter furiously. As the dusk deepened into darkness I began to feel distinctly chill. My wet bathing trunks flapped against my thighs as the cold air rushed by. My legs were aching. My hands were beginning to chafe against the tow-bar. My fingers were going numb. I could, I supposed, just let go the rope, and sink.
I was not over-keen however on swimming in the Tungud after dusk. The area was at one time famous for its crocodiles, and I had seen one or two of them, as well as many snakes and monitor lizards, during the few months I had lived on the riverside. We had caught an eighteen-foot python under the Club a couple of evenings before, its belly swollen with fish. I decided to hang on! We swung round the last bend, and the lights of Kampong Ulu came into view. Tundah swung the boat stylishly around in a tight circle and I had to fight to keep my balance. Missing the jungle on the far bank by a few inches, we completed a 180 degree turn. The bright kerosene lamps in the coffee shop sent sharp yellow ripples out across the water. By their light I could see Tundah clearly for a moment. I pointed firmly downstream.
This time the message was understood. He opened the throttle and we thundered off downstream. With the lights of the village behind us, it was now almost dark. I could make out the faint luminescence of the twin sprays from the outboard propellers and an occasional flash from Tundah's torch in the bows. Otherwise I was on my own except for the tow-rope which stretched into the darkness ahead of me like a umbilical cord. My legs by now were trembling with exhaustion. My back was sore. I was shivering with cold. I bellowed at them to stop the launch and let me climb in. It was to no avail. All I could do was cling on desperately to my life-line.
At last we swung, at full speed into the wide Labuk River. Downstream I could see the lights of my attap house and of the Club beyond it. If I had any movement left in my fingers I would have them clamped around a glass of whisky in a matter of minutes. Just as I was contemplating this comforting vision, my skis hit a half-submerged log. I somersaulted into the air, cart-wheeled along the surface a few times and then sank into the warm blackness of the river.
I spluttered to the surface and grabbed for the skis, which were floating off. The noise of the Pekaka 's engines was receding down the river. Incredibly enough, neither one of its redoubtable crew seemed to have noticed that I was no longer attached to the end of the tow-rope. At last the note of the engine changed. They were turning round and coming back for me. The water in the river was by now warmer than the air. It was blissful. I hung on to the skis and let my weary legs hang limply down in the water.
Suddenly I felt something from the depths coil round both my ankles. It was cold and slimy. My God, a crocodile! No, it was a python! Kicking out in frenzy, I sank below the surface. The coils seemed to tighten. I fought frantically to get back to the surface but I was being dragged under by a malignant force. It was sucking me down, down into the black depths of the river. My lungs were bursting. Suddenly one leg was free, then the other. I spat out a mouthful of the Labuk river, and drew a shuddering breath. As I broke the surface, the Pekaka roared out of the darkness. It heeled over violently as they spotted the tip of the sinker, which had been the cause of my downfall. I heard Tundah shout. The launch avoided the log, and surged on. I could see, the torch probing right and left as it disappeared upstream.
I realised two things virtually simultaneously. First, in their preoccupation with avoiding the sinker, Kong Miew and Tundah had not spotted me. Second, the monster from the depths, from whose dreadful tentacles I had just escaped, had been my swimming-trunks. They had somehow slipped down when I hit the water, and wrapped themselves round my ankles. I probed around below the surface with my feet but felt nothing. The river at that point was over 20 feet deep. I was now stark naked, dressed only in a Rolex watch. I felt suddenly rather more vulnerable. I decided to float on my back!
The noise of the Pekaka was still receding up the Tungud. It might, I thought, be a few minutes before they came back again. I experimented with the skis. I found that by wedging them at right angles under my neck and my knees, I could float very comfortably in a sort of reclining-chair position. I drifted gently downstream, feet first, sculling gently with my hands and looking up at the stars which were now beginning to emerge. This was much better than water-skiing, I decided.
The incident with the man-eating swimming costume had left me uneasily aware of the local fauna. However, the Labuk was even more renowned for its ghosts than for its crocodiles. If you were to believe the locals, there were more ghosts, vampires, and djinns per acre in the Labuk Valley, than commuters at Waterloo Station in the rush hour. The various religions of South East Asia sometimes form only thin veins over deep veins of superstition and animism. Each immigrant group coming to the Labuk area, Javanese, Ilocanos, Suluks, Dayaks, Bugis, Cocos Islanders, Timorese, Chinese, Indians and Malays, had brought with them their own folklore. The indigenous races, the Kadazans upstream and the Tidongs, Banjars, and Orang Sungai downstream, also had a veritable pantheon of both good and evil spirits.
The ghoul which most worried my Kadazan friends, was Mohkodong. My neighbour, Rangga, who owned a small rice field in the lower Tungud, described him to me one evening in hushed tones, sitting on my veranda with a beer and from time to time glancing uneasily over his shoulder at the dark river behind him. Mohkodong was apparently a creature of the night. He was not an attractive character. He had a huge head and long streaming entrails. He would come up out of the depths of the river and pluck an unwary traveller right out of his canoe. Mohkodong ate rotting human flesh. He had an unpleasant habit it seemed, of devouring dead bodies, which were awaiting burial. He would claw his way up out of the river. He would drag away the corpse and substitute, Rangga told me, a banana stump inside the winding sheet.
My good friend Ibrahim Sulong, who was an authority on local superstitions, assured me that he had never heard of a European being attacked by Mohkodong. In my current rather vulnerable situation I just hoped he was right. By now, in the strong current I had floated well past the Club; however I could hear the welcome noise of the launch coming back downstream. Then, whilst it was still a hundred yards away, the note of the engine changed once, more as Tundah having reached the spot where he had first discovered that I was gone, swung the speed-boat round and proceeded upstream again. Obviously he had not tumbled to the fact that I was being transported downstream by the current at a fairly brisk pace. Now there was nothing other than a solid wall of jungle on each side of the river, between me and Klagan island.
The jungle along the river bank is a noisy place at night. The whine of the cicadas was now enhanced by the night chorus from the riverside frogs, and this was punctured from time to time by the screech of an eagle owl. Its cry was followed by the crashing of branches in the top of the trees, as the monkeys took fright and leapt chattering to safer positions. From time to time I drifted past small bushes leaning out over the river, lit up like Christmas trees by fire-flies, switching on and off in perfect unison as if someone was flicking a switch. Many tourists would pay a fortune for a trip like this I thought. I had a decision to make however. Clearly, I could forget about being picked up by the speedboat. By now Tundah and Kong Miew, having searched up and down the river, probably thought I was at the bottom of the river, with my bones being picked clean by a hungry Mohkodong.
I could of course easily manoeuvre (plan) over to the next mud-bank, climb out and wait shivering for the dawn. In my naked state however I would be a tasty feast for every mosquito and leech in the area. It was not an inviting prospect. Alternatively, I could continue to float comfortably downstream until I reached the Chinese Traders' shops at Klagan. It really was a very easy decision. I continued to drift along under the stars, in a sort of pre-natal position. In the warm black embrace of the river I was back in the womb. I sank slowly into a curious trance-like state. I could, I felt, drift along like this forever.
My dream-like progress came to an abrupt end. I had allowed myself to drift head first, rather close to the right bank, under a huge overhanging tree whose branches brushed the surface of the water. My head bumped against something hard and solid. I grunted with surprise and twisted round on to my belly, sinking briefly under the water as I did so. I surfaced with a splash and brushed the hair from my eyes. I had bumped into a small padau - a dug-out canoe. I grabbed hold of it as I swept past. There was a strangled gasp and a semi-crouching figure moved in the darkness. I realised instantly who it was. It was my Kadazan gardener Urut-Turut. Most evenings Urut-Turut paddled his little padau down the river to set his prawn traps, baited with dried copra, under the overhanging branches along the far bank. Tonight he was a little later than usual.
As a pair of pale white tentacles snaked up out of the water to grab his padau, Urut-Turut moaned with horror. I made reassuring noises as I tried to clamber aboard. The canoe rocked precariously. Seizing his paddle, Urut Turut made a wild swipe in my direction and struck out in a frenzy into mid stream, heading for the far bank. I clung on determinedly. We were half way across the river before I managed to persuade the distraught Urut-Turut that the hairy apparition clinging fast to the stern of his padau was the Tuan Besar, and not the dreaded Mohkodong from the depths of the Labuk River.
In the following months, some of the younger members of our local staff were to become very proficient at water skiing and I used to see them doing all sorts of intricate manoeuvres on a slalom route which they marked out with floating drums on the river in front of the club. For some reason, after my initial success I was never very keen on the sport.
To explain why I was working in the Labuk Valley of North Borneo in the early nineteen sixties, we should I suppose go back to the beginning. The story really started when a Scottish lady, Miss Helen Wright, inherited from her father a 999 year lease for an area of 10,000 acres of land i the British Colony of North Borneo. The marketable timber had been extracted ove most of the area, and part of it had been planted with tobacco during the short-lived tobacco boom of 1890. The tobacco estate had been abandoned after only three or four years. The lease had then been purchased in 1913, as a speculative venture, by Haes-Wright Ltd, a Calcutta company owned partly by Miss Wright's father, and partly by the Haes family in London. This company, now defunct, had done nothing with the property. Miss Wright who lived on the Scottish island of Arran, sought the advice of her local bank manager. He sent the lease to the general manager of the Chartered Bank in London who contacted Unilever to see if they were interested in buying it.
Unilever was the world's largest buyer of oils and fats which they used in the production of margarine, cooking-oils, ice cream and other products. The chairman, Lord Cole, was worried about the future supplies of raw materials. The bulk of the world's palm oil in the first half of the twentieth century, came from Congo and Nigeria. However, agricultural production in both countries was stagnant and it was becoming clear that with their rapidly expanding populations, there would be very little palm oil available for export to Europe in future years. By the late fifties, South East Asia was beginning to emerge as the dominant producer of palm oil and coconut oil, but even there, there was some doubt as to the future.
Communism was rampant in South East Asia. Malaya had been fighting a war against communist terrorists for nearly ten years. Indonesia had the third largest communist party in the world. The countries of Indo-China were involved in a war, first with France and then with USA. There was turmoil and political unrest in the Philippines. Some western strategists believed that China planned to take over one country after another, until the whole of South East Asia was part of the communist block and on the wrong side of what was then called the "Bamboo Curtain." If they succeeded, they could simply turn off the flow of commodities to the west, including vegetable oils and natural rubber.
Unilever had been involved in oil palm and coconut plantations in Africa and the Solomon Islands since the early nineteen hundreds. It had already, in 1948, started to transfer the technology it had gained in the breeding, cultivation, and processing of the oil palm in Africa, to a plantation which it had acquired in Johore. North Borneo was still a British colony and, it was thought, probably safe against any Communist Chinese take-over. Lord Cole, in the face of some opposition from the Unilever board, decided therefore that it would be prudent to start a pioneering oil palm plantation in the hope that it would encourage a flourishing oil palm industry to develop in the colony over the next few decades.
The Unilever agronomists made a brief visit to the colony. They agreed that conditions on the east coast of North Borneo were ideal for oil palm cultivation, with high ambient temperatures all the year round, an average of nearly 2500 hours of sunshine and an annual rainfall of over 150 inches spread over almost every month of the year.
Colin Black, at that time the Vice-Chairman of Unilever Plantations International, was familiar with South East Asia, having previously run the Lever Bros. Company in Thailand. He was given the task of finding a suitable concession in North Borneo. The approach by the Chartered Bank, regarding the Haes-Wright Concession was therefore very timely. After a brief investigation of the property, Unilever decided to buy the lease from Miss Wright and the descendants of the Haes Brothers, whom they tracked down in the East End of London.
My own career with Unilever Plantations International started in 1951 after I finished a two-year spell of national service. As a young subaltern in Kenya, I had been in charge of African troops, and had been responsible for taking convoys of lorries from Mombasa port up to the headquarters in Nairobi. It was an exciting posting, and I had got a taste for adventure. When my release was imminent I did not relish the thought of returning to Scotland to become a student at Aberdeen University. Neither did I relish the thought of taking a post in the Bank of Scotland where I had spent the few months between leaving Gordons College and being called up for national service. I replied to an advertisement from Unilever, for overseas managers for their Plantations division. They offered me the job of assistant manager on their oil palm plantation near Kluang in Malaya at the princely sum of £600 per year.
Pamol Kluang when I arrived in May 1951 was a hotbed of Communist activity. The Emergency was in full swing. It was a highly dangerous time, and I was lucky to survive. During the next seven years, I learned my trade as an oil palm planter. I passed the examinations of the Incorporated Society of Planters, including the Malay and Chinese (Hakka) language exams. I met my wife Olive, when she was working for the British High Commissioner in Singapore. Our first daughter, Catriona, was born in the British Military Hospital in Kluang and Fiona in South Wales, when Olive was back on leave in UK. The family left Malaya in 1958, the year after it achieved Independence. I was promoted to be the manager of Unilever's oil palm estate in Eastern Nigeria.
One hot afternoon in August, out of the blue, in my office on Calabar Oil Palm Estate, I received the following cable from London:
To Leslie Davidson, From Unilever Plantations International
Manager C.O.P.E. London.
Unilever have acquired 10,000 acres lease of abandoned tobacco estate in North Borneo for development of new oil palm estate stop We propose to offer you the position of manager this project stop This will involve your immediate return UK and departure soonest for Borneo stop Please cable us your acceptance by return stop
Colin Black.
In our three years in West Africa, first in Cameroons and later in Eastern Nigeria, the family had never felt entirely at home, as we had in Johore. It had taken Olive some time to get used to shopping in the local market place with a line of vultures sitting on the tin roof above her, waiting to swoop down on scraps of offal discarded by the butchers.
Our house was in a fairly isolated position, about eight miles from the historic old town of Calabar. This had been a center of the slave trade in the eighteenth century. The local tribe, the Effics, had been notorious slave traders, the middlemen who sold the slaves brought down from the interior to the captains of the British ships waiting off-shore to load up with their human cargo, or to the Arab slavers in their forays down the Cross River.
From our verandah in the evenings we frequently heard drumming which went on for hours through the night, coming from the surrounding villages, where the Ekpe (Leopard) Society was still flourishing. This, allied to our knowledge of its grim history left us conscious of the pervasive almost sinister atmosphere of the region. .
Olive and the girls were as delighted as I was at the prospect of leaving Nigeria to return once again to the Far East. I did not feel it was necessary to concern myself about such petty details as remuneration and terms of service. Within minutes, I had sent a cable back, accepting the position.
The Beginning
It is not every day, I suppose, that a man might find himself floating, stark naked and alone, down a Borneo river, in pitch darkness. I was, in a manner of speaking, lost. Only in a manner of speaking of course, because I knew exactly where I was in terms of time and space. It was around seven-thirty on the evening of 16th April 1961. I had been in the water about half an hour. My present position therefore was just under two miles downstream from the junction of the Labuk and the Tungud rivers, and about twenty miles from the Sulu Sea, in Her Majesty's Colony of British North Borneo. Since my companions obviously could not find me, it might be more strictly accurate, I thought, to say that I was misplaced rather than lost.
`Scottish Planter Misplaced in Jungle River'
The headlines in the North Borneo News would look ridiculous. There was an element of carelessness about it.
Less than an hour or so earlier, I had achieved the distinction of becoming the first human being in history to water-ski on the Labuk River. After more unsuccessful attempts than Robert the Bruce's spider, I had eventually managed to cling on to the tow-bar long enough for the outboard launch to pull me bodily up out of the water. I found myself for the first time in my life skittering along on the surface, balanced somewhat precariously on my skis. It was a great feeling. My sudden success created much excitement amongst the small group of locals who had come along for an evening drink to the riverside atap hut, which we somewhat pretentiously called the Labuk Club. They cheered and waved.
With my launch driver Tundah up front at the controls of the Pekaka, and with Kong Miew looking after the twin 60 h.p. Mercury outboard motors in the stern, I clung fiercely to the tow-bar with one hand, and pointed upstream. It would be nice, I thought, now that I had got the knack, to have one or two turns around the wide pool formed by the junction of the Labuk and the Tungud, before returning to the Club for a celebratory drink.
The sun was just sinking behind Mount Kinabalu. It would be dark in a few minutes. It was one of those spectacular blood-shot Sabah sunsets, which are only to be seen in the dry season, in the few brief minutes before it gets dark. I seemed to be carving my way through a sheet of rippling red satin and the spray from the outboards arched in a golden parabola. I was beginning to enjoy myself. There was really nothing to this water skiing lark! Instead of circling as I intended however, Tundah swung the Pekaka into the much narrower Tungud tributary and we surged on upstream. This was far too ambitious for my first run. The sun had nearly disappeared and the jagged ridges of Kinabalu were turning velvety black against a muted purple sky.
There is no twilight on the equator. It would be dark before we could get back. I shouted at them. I waved furiously. Kong Miew at the stern waved back happily. We sped on upstream. I began to realise that proper water-skiers must have some sort of signaling system for communicating with their crew.
We surged on and on, up the Tungud. The dark jungle now crowded in on both sides, blocking out any last glimpse of the sunset. The was from our wake broke on the mud flats at each bend; making the crab-eating rah monkeys leap back into the trees and chatter furiously. As the dusk deepened into darkness I began to feel distinctly chill. My wet bathing trunks flapped against my thighs as the cold air rushed by. My legs were aching. My hands were beginning to chafe against the tow-bar. My fingers were going numb. I could, I supposed, just let go the rope, and sink.
I was not over-keen however on swimming in the Tungud after dusk. The area was at one time famous for its crocodiles, and I had seen one or two of them, as well as many snakes and monitor lizards, during the few months I had lived on the riverside. We had caught an eighteen-foot python under the Club a couple of evenings before, its belly swollen with fish. I decided to hang on! We swung round the last bend, and the lights of Kampong Ulu came into view. Tundah swung the boat stylishly around in a tight circle and I had to fight to keep my balance. Missing the jungle on the far bank by a few inches, we completed a 180 degree turn. The bright kerosene lamps in the coffee shop sent sharp yellow ripples out across the water. By their light I could see Tundah clearly for a moment. I pointed firmly downstream.
This time the message was understood. He opened the throttle and we thundered off downstream. With the lights of the village behind us, it was now almost dark. I could make out the faint luminescence of the twin sprays from the outboard propellers and an occasional flash from Tundah's torch in the bows. Otherwise I was on my own except for the tow-rope which stretched into the darkness ahead of me like a umbilical cord. My legs by now were trembling with exhaustion. My back was sore. I was shivering with cold. I bellowed at them to stop the launch and let me climb in. It was to no avail. All I could do was cling on desperately to my life-line.
At last we swung, at full speed into the wide Labuk River. Downstream I could see the lights of my attap house and of the Club beyond it. If I had any movement left in my fingers I would have them clamped around a glass of whisky in a matter of minutes. Just as I was contemplating this comforting vision, my skis hit a half-submerged log. I somersaulted into the air, cart-wheeled along the surface a few times and then sank into the warm blackness of the river.
I spluttered to the surface and grabbed for the skis, which were floating off. The noise of the Pekaka 's engines was receding down the river. Incredibly enough, neither one of its redoubtable crew seemed to have noticed that I was no longer attached to the end of the tow-rope. At last the note of the engine changed. They were turning round and coming back for me. The water in the river was by now warmer than the air. It was blissful. I hung on to the skis and let my weary legs hang limply down in the water.
Suddenly I felt something from the depths coil round both my ankles. It was cold and slimy. My God, a crocodile! No, it was a python! Kicking out in frenzy, I sank below the surface. The coils seemed to tighten. I fought frantically to get back to the surface but I was being dragged under by a malignant force. It was sucking me down, down into the black depths of the river. My lungs were bursting. Suddenly one leg was free, then the other. I spat out a mouthful of the Labuk river, and drew a shuddering breath. As I broke the surface, the Pekaka roared out of the darkness. It heeled over violently as they spotted the tip of the sinker, which had been the cause of my downfall. I heard Tundah shout. The launch avoided the log, and surged on. I could see, the torch probing right and left as it disappeared upstream.
I realised two things virtually simultaneously. First, in their preoccupation with avoiding the sinker, Kong Miew and Tundah had not spotted me. Second, the monster from the depths, from whose dreadful tentacles I had just escaped, had been my swimming-trunks. They had somehow slipped down when I hit the water, and wrapped themselves round my ankles. I probed around below the surface with my feet but felt nothing. The river at that point was over 20 feet deep. I was now stark naked, dressed only in a Rolex watch. I felt suddenly rather more vulnerable. I decided to float on my back!
The noise of the Pekaka was still receding up the Tungud. It might, I thought, be a few minutes before they came back again. I experimented with the skis. I found that by wedging them at right angles under my neck and my knees, I could float very comfortably in a sort of reclining-chair position. I drifted gently downstream, feet first, sculling gently with my hands and looking up at the stars which were now beginning to emerge. This was much better than water-skiing, I decided.
The incident with the man-eating swimming costume had left me uneasily aware of the local fauna. However, the Labuk was even more renowned for its ghosts than for its crocodiles. If you were to believe the locals, there were more ghosts, vampires, and djinns per acre in the Labuk Valley, than commuters at Waterloo Station in the rush hour. The various religions of South East Asia sometimes form only thin veins over deep veins of superstition and animism. Each immigrant group coming to the Labuk area, Javanese, Ilocanos, Suluks, Dayaks, Bugis, Cocos Islanders, Timorese, Chinese, Indians and Malays, had brought with them their own folklore. The indigenous races, the Kadazans upstream and the Tidongs, Banjars, and Orang Sungai downstream, also had a veritable pantheon of both good and evil spirits.
The ghoul which most worried my Kadazan friends, was Mohkodong. My neighbour, Rangga, who owned a small rice field in the lower Tungud, described him to me one evening in hushed tones, sitting on my veranda with a beer and from time to time glancing uneasily over his shoulder at the dark river behind him. Mohkodong was apparently a creature of the night. He was not an attractive character. He had a huge head and long streaming entrails. He would come up out of the depths of the river and pluck an unwary traveller right out of his canoe. Mohkodong ate rotting human flesh. He had an unpleasant habit it seemed, of devouring dead bodies, which were awaiting burial. He would claw his way up out of the river. He would drag away the corpse and substitute, Rangga told me, a banana stump inside the winding sheet.
My good friend Ibrahim Sulong, who was an authority on local superstitions, assured me that he had never heard of a European being attacked by Mohkodong. In my current rather vulnerable situation I just hoped he was right. By now, in the strong current I had floated well past the Club; however I could hear the welcome noise of the launch coming back downstream. Then, whilst it was still a hundred yards away, the note of the engine changed once, more as Tundah having reached the spot where he had first discovered that I was gone, swung the speed-boat round and proceeded upstream again. Obviously he had not tumbled to the fact that I was being transported downstream by the current at a fairly brisk pace. Now there was nothing other than a solid wall of jungle on each side of the river, between me and Klagan island.
The jungle along the river bank is a noisy place at night. The whine of the cicadas was now enhanced by the night chorus from the riverside frogs, and this was punctured from time to time by the screech of an eagle owl. Its cry was followed by the crashing of branches in the top of the trees, as the monkeys took fright and leapt chattering to safer positions. From time to time I drifted past small bushes leaning out over the river, lit up like Christmas trees by fire-flies, switching on and off in perfect unison as if someone was flicking a switch. Many tourists would pay a fortune for a trip like this I thought. I had a decision to make however. Clearly, I could forget about being picked up by the speedboat. By now Tundah and Kong Miew, having searched up and down the river, probably thought I was at the bottom of the river, with my bones being picked clean by a hungry Mohkodong.
I could of course easily manoeuvre (plan) over to the next mud-bank, climb out and wait shivering for the dawn. In my naked state however I would be a tasty feast for every mosquito and leech in the area. It was not an inviting prospect. Alternatively, I could continue to float comfortably downstream until I reached the Chinese Traders' shops at Klagan. It really was a very easy decision. I continued to drift along under the stars, in a sort of pre-natal position. In the warm black embrace of the river I was back in the womb. I sank slowly into a curious trance-like state. I could, I felt, drift along like this forever.
My dream-like progress came to an abrupt end. I had allowed myself to drift head first, rather close to the right bank, under a huge overhanging tree whose branches brushed the surface of the water. My head bumped against something hard and solid. I grunted with surprise and twisted round on to my belly, sinking briefly under the water as I did so. I surfaced with a splash and brushed the hair from my eyes. I had bumped into a small padau - a dug-out canoe. I grabbed hold of it as I swept past. There was a strangled gasp and a semi-crouching figure moved in the darkness. I realised instantly who it was. It was my Kadazan gardener Urut-Turut. Most evenings Urut-Turut paddled his little padau down the river to set his prawn traps, baited with dried copra, under the overhanging branches along the far bank. Tonight he was a little later than usual.
As a pair of pale white tentacles snaked up out of the water to grab his padau, Urut-Turut moaned with horror. I made reassuring noises as I tried to clamber aboard. The canoe rocked precariously. Seizing his paddle, Urut Turut made a wild swipe in my direction and struck out in a frenzy into mid stream, heading for the far bank. I clung on determinedly. We were half way across the river before I managed to persuade the distraught Urut-Turut that the hairy apparition clinging fast to the stern of his padau was the Tuan Besar, and not the dreaded Mohkodong from the depths of the Labuk River.
In the following months, some of the younger members of our local staff were to become very proficient at water skiing and I used to see them doing all sorts of intricate manoeuvres on a slalom route which they marked out with floating drums on the river in front of the club. For some reason, after my initial success I was never very keen on the sport.
To explain why I was working in the Labuk Valley of North Borneo in the early nineteen sixties, we should I suppose go back to the beginning. The story really started when a Scottish lady, Miss Helen Wright, inherited from her father a 999 year lease for an area of 10,000 acres of land i the British Colony of North Borneo. The marketable timber had been extracted ove most of the area, and part of it had been planted with tobacco during the short-lived tobacco boom of 1890. The tobacco estate had been abandoned after only three or four years. The lease had then been purchased in 1913, as a speculative venture, by Haes-Wright Ltd, a Calcutta company owned partly by Miss Wright's father, and partly by the Haes family in London. This company, now defunct, had done nothing with the property. Miss Wright who lived on the Scottish island of Arran, sought the advice of her local bank manager. He sent the lease to the general manager of the Chartered Bank in London who contacted Unilever to see if they were interested in buying it.
Unilever was the world's largest buyer of oils and fats which they used in the production of margarine, cooking-oils, ice cream and other products. The chairman, Lord Cole, was worried about the future supplies of raw materials. The bulk of the world's palm oil in the first half of the twentieth century, came from Congo and Nigeria. However, agricultural production in both countries was stagnant and it was becoming clear that with their rapidly expanding populations, there would be very little palm oil available for export to Europe in future years. By the late fifties, South East Asia was beginning to emerge as the dominant producer of palm oil and coconut oil, but even there, there was some doubt as to the future.
Communism was rampant in South East Asia. Malaya had been fighting a war against communist terrorists for nearly ten years. Indonesia had the third largest communist party in the world. The countries of Indo-China were involved in a war, first with France and then with USA. There was turmoil and political unrest in the Philippines. Some western strategists believed that China planned to take over one country after another, until the whole of South East Asia was part of the communist block and on the wrong side of what was then called the "Bamboo Curtain." If they succeeded, they could simply turn off the flow of commodities to the west, including vegetable oils and natural rubber.
Unilever had been involved in oil palm and coconut plantations in Africa and the Solomon Islands since the early nineteen hundreds. It had already, in 1948, started to transfer the technology it had gained in the breeding, cultivation, and processing of the oil palm in Africa, to a plantation which it had acquired in Johore. North Borneo was still a British colony and, it was thought, probably safe against any Communist Chinese take-over. Lord Cole, in the face of some opposition from the Unilever board, decided therefore that it would be prudent to start a pioneering oil palm plantation in the hope that it would encourage a flourishing oil palm industry to develop in the colony over the next few decades.
The Unilever agronomists made a brief visit to the colony. They agreed that conditions on the east coast of North Borneo were ideal for oil palm cultivation, with high ambient temperatures all the year round, an average of nearly 2500 hours of sunshine and an annual rainfall of over 150 inches spread over almost every month of the year.
Colin Black, at that time the Vice-Chairman of Unilever Plantations International, was familiar with South East Asia, having previously run the Lever Bros. Company in Thailand. He was given the task of finding a suitable concession in North Borneo. The approach by the Chartered Bank, regarding the Haes-Wright Concession was therefore very timely. After a brief investigation of the property, Unilever decided to buy the lease from Miss Wright and the descendants of the Haes Brothers, whom they tracked down in the East End of London.
My own career with Unilever Plantations International started in 1951 after I finished a two-year spell of national service. As a young subaltern in Kenya, I had been in charge of African troops, and had been responsible for taking convoys of lorries from Mombasa port up to the headquarters in Nairobi. It was an exciting posting, and I had got a taste for adventure. When my release was imminent I did not relish the thought of returning to Scotland to become a student at Aberdeen University. Neither did I relish the thought of taking a post in the Bank of Scotland where I had spent the few months between leaving Gordons College and being called up for national service. I replied to an advertisement from Unilever, for overseas managers for their Plantations division. They offered me the job of assistant manager on their oil palm plantation near Kluang in Malaya at the princely sum of £600 per year.
Pamol Kluang when I arrived in May 1951 was a hotbed of Communist activity. The Emergency was in full swing. It was a highly dangerous time, and I was lucky to survive. During the next seven years, I learned my trade as an oil palm planter. I passed the examinations of the Incorporated Society of Planters, including the Malay and Chinese (Hakka) language exams. I met my wife Olive, when she was working for the British High Commissioner in Singapore. Our first daughter, Catriona, was born in the British Military Hospital in Kluang and Fiona in South Wales, when Olive was back on leave in UK. The family left Malaya in 1958, the year after it achieved Independence. I was promoted to be the manager of Unilever's oil palm estate in Eastern Nigeria.
One hot afternoon in August, out of the blue, in my office on Calabar Oil Palm Estate, I received the following cable from London:
To Leslie Davidson, From Unilever Plantations International
Manager C.O.P.E. London.
Unilever have acquired 10,000 acres lease of abandoned tobacco estate in North Borneo for development of new oil palm estate stop We propose to offer you the position of manager this project stop This will involve your immediate return UK and departure soonest for Borneo stop Please cable us your acceptance by return stop
Colin Black.
In our three years in West Africa, first in Cameroons and later in Eastern Nigeria, the family had never felt entirely at home, as we had in Johore. It had taken Olive some time to get used to shopping in the local market place with a line of vultures sitting on the tin roof above her, waiting to swoop down on scraps of offal discarded by the butchers.
Our house was in a fairly isolated position, about eight miles from the historic old town of Calabar. This had been a center of the slave trade in the eighteenth century. The local tribe, the Effics, had been notorious slave traders, the middlemen who sold the slaves brought down from the interior to the captains of the British ships waiting off-shore to load up with their human cargo, or to the Arab slavers in their forays down the Cross River.
From our verandah in the evenings we frequently heard drumming which went on for hours through the night, coming from the surrounding villages, where the Ekpe (Leopard) Society was still flourishing. This, allied to our knowledge of its grim history left us conscious of the pervasive almost sinister atmosphere of the region. .
Olive and the girls were as delighted as I was at the prospect of leaving Nigeria to return once again to the Far East. I did not feel it was necessary to concern myself about such petty details as remuneration and terms of service. Within minutes, I had sent a cable back, accepting the position.
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